LC 2015 - Special session on Laughter Computing: towards machines able to deal with laughter

Laughter is a significant feature of human communication and it has strong social dimensions. It can convey various meanings and accompany different emotions, most often positive, e.g., amusement, or relief, but also negative, e.g., signaling irony, or embarrassment. Laughter is characterized by a very complex expressive behavior that includes major expressive modalities: auditory, facial expressions, and body movements.
The goal of this special session is to gather recent achievements in laughter computing in order to trigger new research directions in this field. Taking into account the multimodal nature of laughter, its variety of contexts and meanings, this session aims at providing an interdisciplinary perspective and refinement of future research directions into laughter in human-computer interaction. A special attention is on the multimodal nature of laughter expressions, including multimodal analysis of different laughter types, on modeling different communicative meanings of laughter, understanding role of laughter in HCI, laughter perception and impact in user’s experience and task performance.
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
? Multimodal fusion algorithms for laughter detection
? Multimodal synthesis of laughter expressions
? Laughter-based social signals computational models
? Mimicry in laugher
? Modelling of different laughter communicative meanings
? Laughter as an expression of different affects in HCI
? Computational models of laughter elicitation